A parallel bi-objective hybrid metaheuristic for energy-aware scheduling for cloud computing systems

In this paper, we investigate the problem of scheduling precedence-constrained parallel applications on heterogeneous computing systems (HCSs) like cloud computing infrastructures. This kind of application was studied and used in many research works. Most of these works propose algorithms to minimize the completion time (makespan) without paying much attention to energy consumption. We propose a new parallel hi-objective hybrid genetic algorithm that takes into account, not only makespan, but also energy consumption. We particularly focus on the island parallel model and the multi-start parallel model. Our new method is based on dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) to minimize energy consumption. In terms of energy consumption, the obtained results show that our approach outperforms previous scheduling methods by a significant margin. In terms of completion time, the obtained schedules are also shorter than those of other algorithms. Furthermore, our study demonstrates the potential of DVS. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.